How Feminism Led To Two World Wars

Simon Sheppard

Jones, the King's jockey, and Emily Davison both lie unconscious after Davison walked onto the course during the Derby of 4 June 1913. Jones escaped serious injury but Davison never regained consciousness and died four days later, though it was more a bungled attempt to spoil the race than a suicide mission. The suffragettes' campaign was of increasingly sensational and criminal actions deliberately intended to attract press attention but which, by 1914, had lost them what public support they had. The Daily Mirror paid £1,000 for this photograph, a fortune at the time.

In the following article I shall attempt to show, by a sequence of logical progression, that the rise in "Feminism" led directly to two disastrous world wars involving the death of 50-60 million people and many other adverse social and economic effects. The essay will attempt to address the underlying mechanisms  the big picture rather than the fine details  and makes the following assumptions: that humans evolved and that their characteristics must be expressed both individually and collectively to be evolutionarily viable.1

Suffragettes and War

The suffragette movement arose in Britain in the years before the First World War, and this campaign of civil disobedience, arson and hunger strikes by prisoners culminated in parliament granting voting rights to women in January 1918, 10 months before the war ended. Emmeline Pankhurst and her eldest daughter Christabel declared a truce for the duration of the war, and six days after its outbreak the British government released all suffragette prisoners.2

The franchise was given to women even before being widely available to men: at that time only male property-owners were able to vote. Actually, up until the First World War women, having been responsible for the hiring of domestic staff, were the biggest employers, and to grant voting rights to even a minority of women was to consolidate their elevation above millions of men. Lord Curzon, Sir Oswald Mosley's father-in-law, argued in opposing the bill that limiting the vote to women over 30 was a wholly arbitrary restriction which could not last. He told parliament that extending the franchise to women was "a vast, incalculable, and almost catastrophic change... which was without precedent in history and without justification in experience."3 Curzon, and many others since, claimed that having given women the vote it could never be withdrawn, but this is a short-sighted view.

We should ask, and seek an accurate answer to the question: Was it a coincidence that the British government gave women the vote at precisely the same moment in history that it directed a blood feud of a savagery unknown for centuries? Extraordinary lengths were taken to prevail in the First World War, and extraordinary measures were taken rather than accede to the German and American peace overtures which were made, especially during December 1916.4 Further, it is generally accepted that the First World War directly led to the Second.

By about 1700 and for the subsequent two centuries, conflicts between European nations had become almost ritualized. Casualties were minimized, since the combatants of both sides consisted of temporary conscripts, conscious that their major role was to enable some nobleman to prove himself in courage and tactics to his peers. In the recriminations following the famous 1854 Light Brigade charge in the wrong direction the Earl of Cardigan said it was "no part of a general's duty to fight the enemy among private soldiers."5 Having led his cavalry into battle he had not been confronted by someone of equivalent rank with whom he could, according to the protocols of his day, engage. Central to the prevailing notion of "civilized warfare" was that civilians were respected: armies would buy supplies from local inhabitants and sometimes did without if purchases could not be made.6 This was the era in which Thomas Cook is reputed to have organized excursions to watch at the side of battlefields while sipping tea and eating cucumber sandwiches, an era which was all but over by the time the 20th century dawned.

An early breach of the accepted standards of civilized warfare took place when German battleships shelled the English shipyards and town of Hartlepool, and the fishing ports of Scarborough and Whitby, on 16 December 1914, only weeks after the British declaration of war with Germany.7 This was shortly followed by the first German air raid on Britain on 21 December 1914 and the first Zeppelin raid on 19 January 1915. However these attacks had been preceded by the "Destruction of Louvain" of August 1914 and possibly by events taking place during the Boer Wars.

Whichever occasion formed the precedent, the military traditions of the former two centuries had been shed; thenceforth Europeans would fight each other with no holds barred. F. J. P. Veale described this situation as follows:

'From patriotic motives, at first to assist the war effort and later to justify the dictated terms of peace, professional historians, many of them men of great eminence and learning, laboured to confirm and endorse the Wicked Kaiser Myth. Once however this had been exposed as an impudent propaganda fiction, they failed to find any generally acceptable explanation for the blind homicidal frenzy which seized the nations of Europe during the period, 1914-1918, and ultimately they became resigned to leaving the problem for solution to the psychologists and psychiatrists.'8

Evolution and War

Men have subjugated women throughout history for many reasons but one is likely to have been dominant: the need to control population level. The anthropologist Marvin Harris has argued that a sudden population increase around 10,000 BC led to an immediate fall in living standards, and there has hardly been a population reduction since.9 By way of illustration, the 1570 population of two European cities, Hull and Amsterdam, was 4,600 and 30,000 respectively. By 1970 these two cities had grown to contain 286,000 and 831,000 persons; a subsequent fall is trivial by comparison (1991: 266,000 and 703,000). A comparable growth has occurred in North America but over a shorter period. Childbirth and attempts to induce abortions were the major cause of female mortality before 10,000 BC, according to Harris. The present author proposes that population level, especially population density, provides an objective measure of female influence and 10,000 BC was the approximate date at which society ceased to be a patriarchy. Increased population benefits the female; one of its effects, possibly the primal one, is that male targeting strategies are disrupted.

Only humans and ants go to war, these being two species of social animal in an advanced state of evolution. Ants are estimated to have been evolving for 600 million years while humans are supposed to have been around for only two million.10 Humans' rapid advancement is due in part to what Darwin called "the equal transmission of characters."11 This, and the female instinct to make the task of the male as difficult as possible, enhancing his fitness, involves the male, in the long-term, competing with a partial copy of himself. This can be regarded as a subtle expression of the Tit For Tat strategy, a very common and robust strategy in nature.12 If it is subtle, it is certainly not ineffectual.

Suppose that the male evolves the ability to suppress his immediate instinctive impulse to use brute force, instead applying logic and intelligence to prevail. This might occur in the case of an elder male, with failing strength, seeking to maintain his position of dominance over a group of females or territory, using his wits to withstand attempts to depose him by younger, stronger males. By the equal transmission of characters the female inherits his power of will, applying it to suppressing her own instinctive desire for sex, replacing what formerly had been her automatic, involuntary submission as in animal mating. Then the female demands more strenuous effort by the male before she submits; she raises the costs of sex by withholding it. The female policy is to raise the costs of sex, the male to reduce them. Continuous resourcefulness is required by the male to stay one step ahead of the female, who is both his opponent and his symbiont, accelerating the evolutionary process and enhancing the fitness of the race as a whole.

The argument sometimes advanced that war serves to limit population has no basis in reality.13 Population growth is a function of the number of reproductive females, and this is the origin of the female infanticide as practiced in pre-history and which persists in some regions today, notably China.

Procedural Analysis

Procedural Analysis is a new system of human behavior analysis proposed by this author. Referring to Table 1, females prefer signals and tokens because they are ambiguous and therefore manipulative, while males prefer markers and handles because they are unambiguous and often involve the wealth that he creates. Behaviors are regarded as masculine or feminine according to whether they are advantageous for the propagation of male or female genes. The optimal male policy for the furtherance of his genes is to impregnate as many reproductive females as possible, while the optimal female policy is to secure a single, long-term mate of exceptional fitness who will remain with her and provide for her while she rears children.

Males endeavor to obtain physical sex while females, in the main, seek to avoid it. The cost to the female of falling pregnant to a male who deserts her shortly after copulation are enormous, while for the male in this situation they are almost insignificant. The origin of many female procedures is that they compensate for males' greater physical strength. Females abhor violence because if force is employed they almost invariably lose.

The male/female game is the game of opposites. Applying this simple yet powerful and most important of all, accurate model, the male instinct is to compete (maximizing fitness) while the female instinct is to conspire (raising the cost of sex and enforcing monogamy). Females instinctively promote young life and devalue the old, whereas the male instinct is precisely the reverse. In the hardier, more masculine environment of 18th century England it was common to see the bodies of babies and young children on the dung-heaps of large cities.14 Today however a person can be prosecuted for killing a severely handicapped baby, just as if he had murdered a doctor or scientist.

This contrast in the perception of difference is also a function of gender. Theorem 3 in PA is the DSoD Theory (Table 2), so-called because it formalizes females' erroneous perception and, although they do not see it as such, their dishonest nature to some extent. According to this theory, females make small differences larger and large differences smaller. Thus females tend to minimize large differences between the races, between men and women and between humans and animals. (One might compare females' insistence that these great differences are small with their meticulous examination of fine details while shopping.) An example quoted in my book is of someone who insisted that any female over the age of 14 be called a woman but who described herself as a "self-identified political lesbian non-separatist heterosexual."

In opposition, males make large differences larger and small differences smaller. Males will fight to preserve difference but must perceive the difference as large if they are to contemplate laying down their lives for it. They will submerge small differences, such as in personality, to work together in furtherance of a common goal. These are probably the dominant evolutionary origins of male perception; males compete and are interested in size.

Displacement

Proposition 3 of PA states that instincts are never annulled, they are only displaced. If an instinct cannot be expressed in its proper, natural way, it will always find expression in some other, invariably less satisfactory way.

The underlying mechanism of the caretaking and protective instincts is Affection Beneath: it is inappropriate to seek to protect someone or something more powerful than yourself. Displacement is often evident in discrimination and Affection Beneath. To discriminate is a perfectly natural and normal function, taking place every minute of every waking hour (e.g. differentiating between a $5 and a $10 bill). When prohibited if it involves disadvantaging any member of a politically-correct list  groups all expressing female traits  it shortly happens that the only group which can legitimately be discriminated against is white males, who in the feminine way of thinking are a special case. Discrimination must take place, and it is simply a matter of finding an object by which the instinct can find its catharsis.

When the masculine instinct to protect weaker members of his society becomes absurd, such as feeling protective towards a female superior at work, the instinct will be redirected elsewhere. It may instead be directed towards "vulnerable" minorities with "special needs." Alien groups will adopt the role of underclass, formerly occupied by females, and exploit male protection. This protection may be from an individual, as in a person sticking up for his colored friend, or by government. It is not the role of Big Brother the State is adopting but "Big Sister": Big Sister is the accumulation of groups, male and female, employing female policies. Practically all contemporary policies being enacted by Western governments are feminine in nature.

Another example of displacement is the overseas campaigns of national leaders notably, in recent times, American presidents. An individual must have a great lust for power to attain such a position and it is not surprising that once installed he wishes to "flex his muscles" and exercise some real power. He cannot do this at home because of the interests of the people who paid for his election campaign and the agenda of other "string-pullers" behind the scenes. Hence military force is employed against some remote, often backward country instead. The masculine instinct to dominate and subdue is exercised far away because powerful vested interests have made this the path of least resistance.

Displacement of Enemy

Thus we have an analogy with the world wars of modern European history. In the years following the inception of the militant 'Women's Social and Political Union' in 1903 the British Establishment had, quite simply, lost control of women. While the popular image has been portrayed of suffragettes chaining themselves to railings, the reality was a sustained campaign of vociferousness by a small minority of women engaged in open insurrection. In March 1912 women were directed to London's shopping streets to break around 200 shop windows with hammers. Paintings on display in art galleries were attacked and damaged. Explosive devices were placed in Central London and elsewhere, with the elder Pankhurst receiving a prison sentence in January 1913 for its incitement.15 Very real concerns were raised for the assassination of public figures.16 A major part of the suffragettes' criminal, sensation-seeking activities was arson attacks, with young women traipsing across the countryside with cans of fuel to set fire to churches, train stations and the country houses of politicians:

'In December, 1911, and March, 1912, Emily Wilding Davison and Nurse Pitfield had committed spectacular arson on their own initiative, both doing their deeds openly and suffering arrest and punishment. In July 1912, secret arson began to be organised under the direction of Christabel Pankhurst. When the policy was fully under way, certain officials of the Union were given, as their main work, the task of advising incendiaries, and arranging for the supply of such inflammable material, house-breaking tools and other matters as they might require. A certain exceedingly feminine-looking young lady was strolling about London, meeting militants in all sorts of public and unexpected places, to arrange for perilous expeditions. Women, most of them very young, toiled through the night across unfamiliar country, carrying heavy cases of petrol and paraffine [kerosene]. Sometimes they failed; sometimes succeeded in setting fire to an untenanted building  all the better if it were the residence of a notability  or a church, or other place of historic interest. Occasionally they were caught and convicted; usually they escaped.'17

Offenders were given lenient sentences but even these were often only partially enforced. Imprisoned women went on hunger strike and were released under the terms of the "Cat and Mouse Act" of 1913, but this Act merely regularized the mild treatment they already routinely received. Describing a well known London women's prison Sylvia Pankhurst wrote that "Holloway had become a jolly place indeed."18

In the conflict with Germany which began in August 1914, the desire to dominate and subdue women, a natural instinct with sound evolutionary origins, was expressed another way. Germany was subjugated instead, just as a man who has lost control at home seeks to dominate elsewhere. Moreover, the British government had itself become feminized, choosing as its enemy one more masculine than itself, the sort of enemy the female would have chosen. By attacking a more masculine opponent, males had been manipulated into serving the female interest. This hypothesis is supported by the following:

The astonishing rapidity of the declaration of war against Germany, taking place even before a peace lobby could be organized. This was because, in effect, the government had already been at war for some years: the WSPU had publicly declared that a "state of war" existed in 1910.19 However the government's opponent was one for which their options for retaliation were very limited. Frustrated by the terror tactics of the suffragettes, and their impotence in fear of the public reaction which might result from any forceful response, the government was desperate for a "real enemy" they could properly engage.

The suffragettes' alacrity in forming an alliance with the government on the outbreak of war. On 8 September 1914 Christabel Pankhurst returned from Paris and immediately gave a speech not on suffrage but on "The German Peril." Led by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, militant suffragettes became the most enthusiastic advocates of the war. Copying Admiral Charles Fitzgerald with his initial group of thirty women, they became active all over Britain in "White Feather Brigades," handing white feathers to any man in civilian clothing with the intention of shaming him into enlisting.20 So fervent were they that demobbed soldiers, soldiers on temporary leave, civil servants and boys were confronted with this symbol of cowardice. Christabel Pankhurst crossed the Atlantic shortly afterwards to seek American support for the war.

Much of the propaganda of the time featured obvious sexual imagery. Typical was the portrayal of a masculine German "brute" and a vulnerable, feminine Belgium, which men were exhorted to rally to defend.

Note that each component above invokes Affection Beneath and thus an implicit admission of female inferiority. In the first, the fear of public reaction to the normal punishment of suffragettes; in the second, the assumption that women themselves need not enlist to fight and die for a few inches of foreign mud; the third calls again upon the notion of the "weak and vulnerable" female.

The suffragettes' behavior, in their new, masculine role as aggressor, was exaggerated. Similarly (and perhaps in imitation to some extent) the Allies' behavior was exaggerated both during and after the wars because they were conforming to a feminine role (engaging a masculine enemy), a role to which they were unaccustomed. Some call this "over-compensating" but PA is more precise: the mechanism is called EBIAR, Exaggerated Behavior in Alien Role.21 A nation, like a man, that is secure in itself and in its masculine capacity to control does not need or wish to vindictively persecute a vanquished foe. One cannot help but wonder at the carnage and terror which might have been avoided had British bobbies, on facing organized suffragette rebellion, simply been told to "roll up their sleeves."

Certainly most of the policies being pursued by the German government in the years 1933-39 were masculine; indeed nationalism itself is a masculine expression, because the nation is a masculine construct (the feminine equivalent is "the community"). Confirmation of this is readily available with the observation that the great majority of participants in nationalist and patriotic organizations, on both sides of the Atlantic, are male. Some of the masculine policies of the National Socialist regime were that it sought to compete with Britain; it enforced its borders, sought to recover its former territories and later, expel aliens; it was industrial; militaristic (uniform, rank); it upheld the feminine roles of women and had a leadership with an obvious symbology which possessed power and authority.

If, as seems reasonable to suppose, instincts are impelling, and war practically inevitable, being a masculine impulse and unlikely ever to completely disappear, the selection of enemy is of paramount importance. Of interest is Darwin's observation that competition is always most intense between the most closely allied species, a tendency which malevolent elements have been keen to exploit in human societies.22Malign Encouragement is an important policy which appears to have been formally defined by this author for the first time. It is encouraging an opponent to pursue an adverse policy (see Table 3). Racially Britain, America and Germany are similar: many Americans are of German extraction and there was intermarriage between the British and German royal families for generations. Note again the DSoD Theory, "Females make small differences larger." What would have been a masculine choice of enemy? Darwin envisaged the future extinction of Negroes, and was unlikely to have imagined this coming about by peaceful dialogue.23

An additional factor, particularly considering economic boycotts and manipulations behind the scenes, is DRoFC: the Double Reinforcement of Female Characteristics. This is the notion that non-white males possess female characteristics. Even some males of European descent exhibit female characteristics (e.g. homosexual males, monogamous males). Jews may be like homosexuals, expressing feminine traits with masculine force.

Both world wars were won by employing the female policy of the unholy alliance, an expression of the feminine tendency to conspire (etymologically to breathe together; a conspiracy need not be secret). In the first war a pact was forged with Jewry, promising them Palestine in return for bringing America into the war, and in the second the balance was tipped by an alliance with Stalin. Churchill and 'Uncle Joe' had nothing in common except their disdain for Hitler: ostensibly they united against their common, masculine enemy. (I say ostensibly because Stalin was very probably playing his own game of Malign Encouragement: "M. Maisky told a foreign diplomat in London in December, 1940, that he added up British and German losses not in two columns, but in a single column. The confusion, not the recovery, of the West seemed the safest guarantee of Soviet security."24) We see such unholy alliances today in orthodox "left-wing" and "right-wing" politicians' unified condemnations of nationalist parties, as has occurred in France, Britain and the US.

Conclusion

The new system of Procedural Analysis, presented only incompletely here, is a supremely powerful tool which is capable of:

I hope to have demonstrated that sexual politics was a significant, if not essential, component in the formative events of 1914, and that this factor accounts for the unprecedented magnitude of violence of the subsequent two world wars.

Table 1. Basic Categories of Procedure

DEFINITION

EXAMPLES

SIGNAL (F)

A gesture, particularly a sexual one serving to attract a mate

The Accident Signal (e.g. spilling a dink) which is a prompt for male aid, from which a relationship and progeny may result

MARKER (M)

An unambiguous indication of involvement

Talking to someone; buying someone a drink; a female mending or ironing her mate's clothes

TOKEN (F)

When one thing means another

An invitation for a cup of coffee: traditionally, this is an invitation to share in the ritual of its preparation, and to talk

HANDLE (M)

A request which generates a fixed and predetermined response

Calling someone's name. A state in which handles are issued (e.g. being married) is called a handle state

Weakens male markers placed during former encounters and confuses males, making them easier to manipulate

Notes

1. In the terminology of evolutionary biology, traits must satisfy the criteria for being an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS); equivalently, they must have a reason to exist (i.e. be advantageous) and have a means to exist (be heritable).

2. In 1879 Emmeline Goulden married Richard Pankhurst, a lawyer, Member of Parliament and author of the 1870 Act which gave women the right to own property. Christabel Pankhurst had directed the arson campaign from Paris, to which she had fled to escape arrest for conspiracy. Despite her criminal activities Christabel was made a "Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire" in 1936.

4. Moves towards peace were made almost simultaneously by Woodrow Wilson and the German government in December 1916. Only the British government was unresponsive. Although Congressional approval for the US entry into the war was given on 2 April 1917 and the Balfour Declaration was not made until exactly seven months later, being signed by Arthur Balfour on 2 November 1917, Count Leon de Poncins asserts in his State Secrets, USA, 1977, pp. 9-17, that the infamous Declaration was the product of machinations made at the British War Office during 1916.

6. F. J. P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism: The Development of Total Warfare From Serajevo to Hiroshima (London, Mitre Press, 1968), pp. 97-107, first appearing in booklet form in 1948. By the time of its publication as a book the author had incorporated the exterminationist claim.

7. Although WWI grew out of a general European conflagration, there can be little doubt that it was Britain's entry that ultimately elevated it into a world-wide conflict.

10. A currently popular theory to account for the extinction of larger animals such as dinosaurs 65 million years ago is that the earth was struck by a large meteorite or cluster of comets and the large amount of dust thrown into the atmosphere caused massive environmental change. Any creature not capable of subsisting on dead and rotting vegetation during the ensuing two or three year period of darkness became extinct. The major evidence supporting this theory is an otherwise inexplicable iridium stratum.

11. "It is, indeed, fortunate that the law of equal transmission of characters to both sexes prevails with mammals; otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental endowment to woman, as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen." Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed., John Murray, London, 1874, pp. 859-860.

12. In common parlance Tit For Tat is 'You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.' More formally, each of two players can cooperate (C) or defect (D). A TFT player plays C if Protagonist (making the first move) then does what the other player last did (i.e. it is imitative, the female policy; the corresponding male policy is innovation). A celebrated example of such 'reciprocal altruism' in nature is groupers and their cleaner fish, which remove parasites even from inside the mouths of groupers.

Use of the term strategy is problematic in a human context because in game theory, a strategy is a complete specification of what an individual will do in any situation. For humans, an account of every possible eventuality is generally not attainable. In Procedural Analysis a procedure is a distinct sequence of moves in a game, which will be capable of being modeled mathematically, while a policy is a set of procedures.

13. A similar thing is true, incidentally, of cannibalism. It is significant that in South American cannibalism the vast majority of victims were male, although probably the most voracious cannibals, the Polynesians, seem to have eaten male and female alike.

17. E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals, Longmans, 1931, p. 401 (also Virago, London, 1977). Sylvia Pankhurst was a very active suffragette but nonetheless was expelled from the WSPU in 1914 by her mother. The youngest daughter, Adela, was ordered not to speak in public. Harrison (ibid.) gives the number of arson attacks in the first seven months of 1914 as 107.

18. The "Cat and Mouse Act" was the popular name for the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health) Act 1913, by which hunger-striking prisoners were released and could later be re-arrested. Emmeline Pankhurst's sentence on 3 April 1913 was for three years imprisonment but she was re-arrested in 1914 during a demonstration outside Buckingham Palace. E. Sylvia Pankhurst, ibid., p. 376.

19. Times, London, 23 November 1910, p. 8: "The Women's Social and Political Union has issued a statement in which it says:- 'As the Prime Minister will not give us the assurance that women shall be enfranchised next year, we revert to a state of war.'"

20. Even this understates the case. Women displayed placards with the message "Intern Them All" advocating that any young man not in military uniform and "all people of enemy race, men and women, young and old" should be interned. E. Sylvia Pankhurst, ibid., pp. 593-594.

21. A specific example of EBIAR is female police officers and security guards throwing their weight around. Similarly EBIAC is Exaggerated Behaviour in Alien Culture. Examples of this are Muslim women going on shoplifting sprees in Western countries and Western women dressing provocatively while visiting Muslim countries.

22. "The competition will generally be most severe between those forms which are most nearly related to each other in habits, constitution, and structure"; competition is "between the forms which are most like each other in all respects." Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1st ed., John Murray, London, 1859, pp. 165, 324.

23. "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world... The break between men and his nearest allies will then be wider." Charles Darwin, Descent of Man, ibid., pp. 241-242. Veale, ibid., p. 53, makes the distinction between the primary war and the secondary war.

24. Sir E. L. Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War, HMSO, London, 1962, Vol. I, p. xliv. Mentioned in Paul Johnson, A History of the Modern World: From 1917 to the 1980s, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1983, p. 466.

25. Definitions of terms used in Table 4: Vicarious Generosity is giving away, often enthusiastically, something which is not one's to give. Diversionary Purpose is ostensibly pursuing one objective while actually seeking to accomplish another (e.g. a female attending college ostensibly to study but in reality to secure a suitable mate). Transduction is inducing a false feeling (e.g. guilt). Creative Transduction is generating or inventing a problem for the purpose of blaming someone else.